“I Sued My Ex for Giving Me an Std—and I Won”

The whole thing started with a trip to the dentist. Karly Rossiter, then 22, was home on break from the University of Iowa in December 2004 when she went for an appointment. Someone new had taken over the Muscatine, Iowa, practice where Rossiter was a patient—someone new, cute and single. Alan Evans, then 32, was clean-cut and sweet-natured and, of course, had an excellent smile. Rossiter was smitten.

When Rossiter returned for a follow-up, the two hit it off. She had an evening appointment, and afterward, she says, they sat chatting on the waiting room couch into the night. Then Rossiter and Evans started having marathon phone conversations, cracking each other up and revealing more and more about themselves. Rossiter liked what she heard. “He said he was a leader in his church, that he liked to fish, hunt, ride his motorcycle and go out on his boat,” she says. “He seemed low-key, smart, interested in world affairs—just my type.” They made a date for New Year’s Eve, a couple of weeks away.

Because she felt things were about to get serious, Rossiter used one of those long phone calls to have “the talk” about her sexual history. What she told Evans was almost oversharing, but, she says, she felt it was the right thing to do. She told him she’d recently broken up with a long-time boyfriend, her fifth sexual partner, and hadn’t slept with anyone in a few months. With the exception of one irregular Pap smear in 2002, she had a clean bill of health and had never tested positive for STDs. Rossiter recalls Evans following suit, saying he’d been in a sexual “dry spell” for six months and had also never had any STDs. “I had no reason not to trust him,” she says. For that first New Year’s Eve date, the budding couple stayed in: “We got cuddly on the couch,” Rossiter says. “And one thing led to another.”

The following day, Rossiter was lounging around her apartment alone in her comfy sweatpants, starry-eyed about her new guy. When Evans called her on the phone, she quickly snatched it up, smiling. But she remembers him saying something during that conversation that shocked her: “He told me that he thought I should get tested for HPV. When I asked why, he just said it would be a good idea.” Within days, Rossiter paid a visit to her gynecologist to be tested for human papilloma virus, the sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. She’d get the test results in several weeks, so until then, Rossiter put the whole thing out of her mind.

And no wonder. She was on her way to falling in love with Evans. But she could never have predicted how their romance would end: with her life turned upside down, and Rossiter herself at the center of a high-stakes court case that could have ripple effects for men and women nationwide. In these pages, Rossiter tells her side of the story exclusively to Glamour. On the advice of his attorneys, Evans declined to be interviewed, but court documents and his trial testimony make it very clear: He believed their relationship started out far more casually than she did. While Rossiter and Evans may still sharply disagree about the exact details, what ultimately happened between them raises some important questions for the rest of us—questions about trust, integrity, personal responsibility and how far we should all go to protect our sexual health.

“It Felt Like the Real Thing”

As Rossiter tells it, the early months of her relationship with Evans were straight out of a sappy movie montage. They went sailing on Evans’ boat and dined out at a local Mexican restaurant. He took her hunting, fishing and sailing. She brought him to the softball games she coached. Once, Evans even dipped her in a Hollywood-style kiss in downtown Muscatine. “It made my heart melt,” says Rossiter. “We were that lovey-dovey couple everyone wanted to be. It felt like the real thing.”

Then one day, while on the phone with Evans, Rossiter opened a letter that would change her life. Due to a logistical mix-up, her HPV results had taken nearly three months to arrive. After reading the letter, she panicked and started crying: She’d tested positive for HPV. Evans told her it was “no big deal.” [On the stand he denied discussing Rossiter’s diagnosis.] But even after their talk, “I was confused about what [the results] meant,” she says. So she started googling. She learned that in most cases, the body fights off the virus naturally. And since, she says, she had no symptoms such as genital warts, she concluded it wasn’t anything to worry about. “I went on with my life,” she says.

Except for one annoying thing. Rossiter had been seeing her doctor about repeated vaginal infections, which she says she’d never had before, and which were treated with rounds of antibiotics. Rossiter began to wonder if her new beau was the source of her infections —and if his recent sexual past was really what she believed it to be.

When Rossiter discussed her infections with Evans and suggested that he should get checked too, he seemed unconcerned. According to his court testimony, Evans told her that he didn’t need to be treated because, among other things, he doesn’t have a vagina. And he told Rossiter something that shocked her: He’d recently slept with a girl named Sasha,* but couldn’t remember if it had happened before they’d started dating. “I was furious. What about his ‘dry spell’?” Rossiter wondered. Evans apologized, she says. “But I was upset. He assured me I was the only woman now and that he was in love with me. And I believed him,” Rossiter says.

Then in August came another disclosure. The two were hanging out at a park, and Evans seemed tense. “What’s going on?” Rossiter asked him.

“What are the three worst things I could say to you?” she remembers Evans saying.

Rossiter’s heart raced. “When your boyfriend says something like that, wild things go through your head. What could be so horrible?” Trembling, she says she made three guesses: “You have AIDS; you’re gay; you got someone pregnant.”

Evans paused. “Sasha told me her due date,” Rossiter recalls him saying. She collapsed—her third guess was spot-on.

But Evans soothed her and even questioned whether he really was the father. “He made himself out to be the victim,” Rossiter says. “He seemed devastated. Despite my anger, I felt bad for him.” And so she didn’t end the relationship.

When the baby came that fall, however, Evans confirmed it was his, and the birth date proved that the child was conceived while Rossiter and Evans were dating. Still, Rossiter stuck by him. “I have no explanation for why I put up with what I did,” she says now. “I have always been a strong girl, and I’ve never taken crap from anyone. He weakened who I was as a person.”

But she wouldn’t stand by him much longer. By January 2006, almost exactly a year since the two started sleeping together, Rossiter was diagnosed with symptoms of two types of HPV: genital warts—she thought she’d seen similar lesions on Evans’ penis, but says he refused to talk about them—and severe dysplasia (precancerous cells on the cervix). “I was a total wreck,” she says. Rossiter was immediately scheduled for LEEP surgery—a painful procedure in which a metal wire with an electrical current is passed along the cervix, cutting out precancerous cells.

Meanwhile, all signs suggested that their relationship was fast deteriorating. Evans didn’t accompany Rossiter to the LEEP procedure. The couple was having vicious fights, and Rossiter felt certain that Evans was cheating. One day, Rossiter’s parents phoned, horrified, after a local waitress gushed to them about her “really sweet and nice” dentist, Alan Evans, who’d called her cell out of the blue after her appointment. Adding to the strain on their relationship, Evans was the father of a newborn and was still in close contact with Sasha. “In hindsight, my relationship was so obviously awful, but it was hard to see,” she says. “Alan always made it seem like our problems weren’t that bad, that we were worth fighting for. I was in so deep, I believed it.”

By June, Rossiter was at the end of her rope. She’d been accepted to law school in the fall, and could almost taste a happier future. She and Evans broke up.

“I Wanted Him to Be Held Accountable”

Once Rossiter was 1,500 miles away from Evans and attending Arizona State University law school, the implications of their relationship finally started to hit home. She felt particularly anxious about her genital warts and dysplasia, and she’d been seeing a therapist to help her deal with all her questions: Would her symptoms continue forever? Would she eventually develop full-blown cervical cancer? At long last, her worries turned to anger. “I came to realize that Alan had gotten away with something dangerous—not only for me but for every woman he’d get involved with down the road. He assured me he had been tested and was clean,” she says. “It’s not right. I wanted him to be held accountable.”

Rossiter’s next step was to make sure he would be: She took Evans to court. As a future lawyer, she did her research and discovered that there have been many lawsuits in which individuals were held responsible for spreading STDs such as HIV and herpes to a partner, but she didn’t find any successful cases centered on HPV. What would make her case so difficult to prove, and so controversial, is the ubiquitous, wily nature of HPV: It’s the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, according to the CDC. It can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact alone—you don’t even need to have intercourse to get it, and using condoms can’t guarantee protection. And once you contract HPV, it can lie dormant for years, causing no symptoms or problems.

Proof of transmission is even harder to come by because there is no HPV test for men. “The only way to know that you caught HPV from a particular man is if you have never had your clothes off with anyone else,” says Jill Grimes, M.D., an Austin, Texas-based family physician and author of Seductive Delusions: How Everyday People Catch STDs. “In some men, HPV shows up as genital warts, but men often show no symptoms—if that’s the case, they have no way of knowing for sure that they are carriers.”

Despite all this, Rossiter found an attorney who was willing to represent her, and in March 2007 she filed a civil case alleging that Evans had given her two sexually transmitted infections. Two years after their relationship ended, in a Muscatine, Iowa, courtroom on July 28, 2008, Rossiter finally faced Evans again.

When Rossiter took the stand, she told the jury about how Evans first won her over. She spoke of the call in which he suggested she get checked for HPV, her diagnosis, her stressful symptoms, the warts she thought she saw on his penis, the other women she suspected. She described how she’d had warts burned off repeatedly and how they still kept coming, and she lamented how she’d now have to tell every man she ever dated about her condition and hope he’d still want to see her. She reminded them that she could develop cervical cancer. She also provided evidence that her insurer at the time was dropping her, not just from cervical cancer coverage but from all cancer coverage, due to her HPV.

When Evans took the stand, he said he couldn’t recall several key events that Rossiter outlined, and denied others. He testified that he never told her he’d had a “dry spell” before they began dating. Though he admitted to seeing Sasha and another woman at the start of their relationship, he said he didn’t tell Rossiter to get tested for HPV the day after their first night together. He denied ever having warts or any STD to his knowledge, and told the court that he never knew Rossiter had HPV until he was served with legal papers. And he implied that Rossiter could be motivated by revenge. “I’m going to spend my life making yours miserable,” he claimed she told him.

In such a he-said-she-said case, perhaps the most damning evidence against Evans was the timeline of Rossiter’s HPV symptoms. Gregory Brotzman, M.D., an HPV specialist, testified that genital warts often appear in women within three weeks to three months of HPV exposure; and that in about 50 percent of cases, precancerous cells will develop within 14 months of HPV exposure. Based on Rossiter’s sexual history and medical records, Dr. Brotzman found it “more likely than not” that she contracted HPV from Evans.

Experts interviewed by Glamour agreed. If you’ve had the same partner for the past six months and develop HPV-related symptoms, says Shobha S. Krishnan, M.D., a New York City gynecologist and the author of The HPV Vaccine Controversy, chances are that your current partner gave it to you. But it’s not a certainty, Dr. Krishnan stresses: “The disease can lie dormant in the body for years and become active at any time. Even if you’re currently in a monogamous relationship, you or your partner could have acquired HPV from a previous relationship.” Scientifically there’s no way to know for sure who gave HPV to Rossiter.

But to win her case, she needed only a “preponderance of evidence” that Evans was responsible. “The jury only needs to find it more likely than not that the defendant did what he is accused of,” says Areva Martin, a Los Angeles-based attorney and author of The Everyday Advocate. (In criminal cases, a defendant’s guilt must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.” )

After a day and a half, the jurors reached a decision: Evans was negligent in transmitting HPV to Rossiter and had acted in “willful and wanton disregard” for her safety. “I was so relieved,” Rossiter says. “The jury sent the message that we shouldn’t tolerate someone being so cavalier about such an important issue.” And Evans must pay her a whopping $1.5 million—one of the largest known monetary awards in an STD case.

Evans appealed, but the Iowa Court of Appeals ruled against him in December 2009. This past March, the Iowa Supreme Court did the same. “Evans is a dentist,” an appellate judge wrote. “He has received medical training and should be aware of the risks associated with communicable diseases…. The harm [he caused] was not a result of mere accident.”

Should people sue over HPV? Some experts believe such cases send a message that people need to take responsibility for their sexual behavior. “If you engage in conduct that you know can cause harm to others, and fail to take precautions or give them an opportunity to opt out, you can hardly complain when you are held accountable,” says Martin. But not everyone agrees that lawsuits are the way to go. “We live in a highly litigious society, and because the rates of HPV are overwhelming, it could clog up our courts if a lot of people sue,” says Joanne Belknap, Ph.D., a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an expert on gender and legal issues. “Lawsuits like this one point to the need for better sex education.”

Asked to comment for Glamour’s story, Evans offered only this statement via e-mail: “Despite what happened in court, I do not and have never had any STD. Furthermore, I have never had any sign or symptom of HPV.” Rossiter stands by her decision to sue. “I’m in no way suggesting that everyone with HPV should seek legal recourse—that’s not the point,” she says. “I think what my case highlights is that honesty is vital in relationships. What happened to me could happen to anyone, single or married, with one partner or a hundred. Women everywhere should know that if a partner puts your health at risk or lies to you, you have the right to stand up for yourself.”

How Do You Know If a Man Has HPV?

It’s very difficult; there’s no test for men, and many men show no symptoms. What’s more, about half of sexually active men and women get HPV at some point in their lives. How can you lower your risk? Use condoms, or consider getting the HPV vaccine, recommended for people up to age 26. And get regular Pap smears
to detect any cancerous changes early, when they are very treatable.

Would You Sue Over an STD?

Karly Rossiter made a major statement with her lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend. But do you think people should sue each other over HPV? Did the court make the right call in this case? Here’s how some Glamour readers reacted:

“I got HPV…it’s a pain in the butt, but would I dream of litigation for contracting it? Even if I get cancer? No. That would be absurd. Sometimes bad stuff happens to you, and you have to roll with it rather than look for people to blame.” —Becca B., 31, Hartford, Conn.

“People think HPV isn’t all that bad, but for many women it’s a huge deal. If rulings like this can help work against the taboo of having, and disclosing, STDs so we can all know and accept risks willingly, then I see nothing wrong with this verdict.” —Melissa R., 32, New York City

“HPV can cause cancer, and this woman had precancerous cells removed, which is a serious thing. But this ruling strikes me as a bit over the top.” —Meghan A., 31, Columbus, Ohio

“This seems unfair. Even assuming he did give it to her, is he now free to sue one of the other women he’d had sex with for giving it to him and for causing him to give it to his girlfriend, and therefore costing him $1.5 million? The mind reels.” —Tania S., 33, Somerville, Mass.